The quick hit

The Lone Ranger and Tonto ride again, and Armie Hammer and Johnny Depp give them humor and personality, but the Old West is so morally ugly in this revisionist pulp epic that it barely seems worth saving.

Grade: C+

Not even performers as game as Armie Hammer, in the title role, and as inspired as Johnny Depp, as Tonto, can yoke the divergent ambitions of Gore Verbinski's "The Lone Ranger." With a new origin story for "the masked rider of the plains,'' it attempts to reboot and spoof this ultimate white-hat hero while elevating Tonto as a Native American champion and rehashing every influential Western or railroad movie ever made. Although it's more fun than "Man of Steel," it's just as relentlessly over-complicated and almost as brutal and sour.

Straight arrow John Reid still becomes the Lone Ranger, and once again he defeats the bad guys. But maybe we should call them "the worst guys." There's no room for the pioneer spirit in this revisionist movie about the transcontinental railroad, and there's no supporting cast of sturdy homesteaders to cheer our heroes on. Even our heroine, Rebecca (Ruth Wilson), is conflicted. She has always yearned for John but she married his brother, Dan, a Texas Ranger who often leaves her and their son alone on the farm.

Lusts for silver and power are all that drive the Westward Expansion in this movie. The most admirable characters are the stoical Comanche Indians. They've been set up to look like they're breaking treaties and raiding settlements. But their chief tells the Lone Ranger that getting out the truth is pointless because "We're already ghosts." As Martin Mull used to say on "Fernwood 2 Night," it's hard to get happy after that.

The theme music from Rossini's "William Tell Overture" swells up on the sound track, but it doesn't rouse the expected surge of nostalgic feeling. This film's warring impulses short-circuit your emotions. For example, you laugh as Dan Reid's Rangers swap stories about the notorious outlaw Butch Cavendish eating a "Red-legger's heart in the Missouri wars" – or maybe it was "the eyes, and he used a toothpick like a pair of pickled onions." You think they're merely playing "Can you top this?" But in the key part of the origin story, the Cavendish gang ambushes the Rangers – including the newly deputized John – and Cavendish really does cut out Dan's heart and eat it.

The movie goes back and forth between tall tale and frontier horror. Director Verbinski doesn't find a way to mesh comedy and sadistic violence: They nullify each other, leaving the audience in limbo. Helena Bonham Carter's one-legged madam, Red Harrington, semi-subtly suggests that Cavendish cut off and ate her lost limb. And some men do salivate over her scrimshaw leg. The film keeps oscillating madly. A realistic massacre of Indians – a slaughter that's genocide in miniature – butts up against a sequence of epic mechanical slapstick that pays homage to Buster Keaton.

What a wasted opportunity! Hammer, with his square good looks and strapping physique, fits right into the buttes and mesas of Monument Valley, the dominant location. His air of noblesse oblige and courtly comic manner suit this film's version of John Reid in his pre-Lone Ranger days as a Harvard-trained lawyer. He returns to Colby, Texas, carrying John Locke's treatises on government in his hand and hoping to become a righteous District Attorney. He travels on a train carrying stern-looking Presbyterians singing "Shall We Gather At the River?" (one of several nods to "The Wild Bunch"), as well as, in a prison car, the fearsome Cavendish (William Fichtner) and the outwardly inscrutable Tonto.

The movie audience meets Tonto before his future partner does, in a framing device set at a Wild West exhibit in a 1933 San Francisco fairground. In the film's most successful absurdist stroke, Tonto, standing like a statue in a diorama called "The Noble Savage in his Natural Habitat," sees his sole admirer -- a tyke in a Lone Ranger mask – and mutters, "Kemosabe?" He ends up relating the whole sprawling saga to the little boy. Tonto starts by reminiscing about the time he and the Lone Ranger robbed a bank. The young fan of the "Lone Ranger" radio show protests that the real team would never have robbed a bank.

"There comes a time when a good man must wear a mask," Tonto explains. The building of the railroad has attracted an unsavory collection of plutocrats, hustlers, opiate-peddlers and prostitutes. Even the top railroad man, a Civil War hero named Latham Cole (Tim Wilkinson), rouses our mistrust by ogling Rebecca.

The lowest of the low is Cavendish. Back on the railroad, in the first of many whirligig reversals, Cavendish frees himself. Then Tonto loosens his chains and is about to blow the varmint away when John Reid halts the execution – he won't allow vigilante justice. This one act will tie Tonto and John Reid together and lead them to expose a chain of greed and corruption that connects financiers, thugs, and the U.S. Army. Everything will be explained, including why Tonto seeks vengeance against Cavendish and wears a dead bird on his head.

A breathless climax involving two runaway trains caps a series of extravagant set pieces with gravity-defying camera moves and death-defying stunts. Yet the movie lacks a unifying, animating spirit. Its best moments come when Tonto nurses John Reid back to life after Cavendish's ambush. The Lone Ranger persona gets filtered through Tonto's mystic vision. The Comanche fashions a mask out of Dan Reid's leather vest. ("Eyes cut by the bullets that killed him," Tonto says. "From the Great Beyond he will protect you ... and the ones you love.") Tonto says the horse that will be known as Silver has proclaimed John "a Spirit Walker – a man who has been to the other side and returned and therefore cannot be killed in battle."

Depp both heightens the hokum and makes it amusing. His layered and freaky deadpan intensity keeps you wondering whether Tonto is full of mystic wisdom or insane, especially when he feeds birdseed to the deceased crow (ad nauseam). He's unconventional without being arbitrary, so banal lines carry the snap and crackle of surprise and good jokes really pop. Depp has the gift of stylization that the filmmakers lack. He looms so large they could have called the movie "Tonto."

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